Spotlight
by blackberet
Summary: We all know the story of Yuna's pilgrimage, but what about the summoners who lived in her shadow? Lady Dona tells her tale.
1. Spotlight

Disclaimer: Final Fantasy X, Spira, and all related characters and locations are owned by Squaresoft, with the exception of a few original characters who will be noted as such. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  
  
So many great stories have been written about Yuna, Tidus, Auron, and all the rest of the main characters in Final Fantasy X. Even minor characters like Isaaru have been lauded in more fanfics than I can name. One character, however, appears repeatedly in the game and has been virtually ignored by FFX writers, despite her desperate cries for attention (get a load of that outfit). This is a brief one-shot POV exploring the feelings of the summoner Dona in the game.  
  
Spotlight  
  
by flame mage  
  
**********  
  
They say that our childhood experiences determine our future. Someone who was burned as a small child is far more likely to be afraid of fire as an adult than others. A child who nearly drowns at the beach may have a fear of swimming later in life.  
  
By the same token, a woman who was ignored and neglected as a child will always strive to be in the spotlight.  
  
*****  
  
My name is Dona.  
  
Of course, calling a lady summoner by her first name would be unimaginably rude. To you, my name is Lady Dona--at least today. Before long, my impassively beautiful statue will stand in every temple across the land, and the plaque will read "High Summoner Dona."  
  
I can imagine those heavy stone replicas of myself, staring down with cold eyes at the firelit chambers of the temples, guarding the entrances to the Cloisters of Trials. Long after I am gone, my image will live on to watch my successor take his or her first steps into the clutches of fate. It will witness the loss of innocence as that child performs the first summoning.  
  
Ah, the summoning. A tradition passed down through the ages in Spira. The tradition of atoning for the sins of the ages, indemnity paid for in blood. Summoners, like butterflies, live for only a short time before succumbing to their fates. They are always young--they have to be, to survive the dangers of the pilgrimage. But while their hair may not have faded to gray and their faces are still unlined by the pressures of a long life, summoners are old in a way that most people will never know. The moment you set foot in the Chamber of the Fayth for the first time, your innocence is ripped from you. There is no turning back. You have condemned yourself in exchange for the salvation of Spira.  
  
In that short life, however, there is much to accomplish. Summoners are required to make a pilgrimage to every temple in Spira. Inside each temple, they pray to the Fayth--spirits that grant them strange mystical beasts called aeons. Only the summoners can call these beasts forth from the sky and harness their power for battle.  
  
But even the awesome power of these aeons is only a training exercise for the real purpose of a summoner. The pilgrimage ends in Zanarkand, the ruined city ravaged a millennium ago. There, the summoner prays to the last fayth and receives the Final Aeon. With this Aeon, he or she calls Sin into one final battle. But there are no victory celebrations for these heroes. The breath taken before calling forth that Final Aeon is the summoner's last, because that act kills the summoner.  
  
Everyone knows it. No one talks about it. Everywhere I go, I hear the whispers and see the stares. I used to whirl on all the people who were watching me and demand to know what they were talking about. It took me a long time to figure out that I was never going to get an answer and to learn to pass by with my head held high like a lady, ignoring it all.  
  
In fact, I had to learn to do everything like a lady, which, if you'll excuse my use of the vernacular, was no picnic. I told everyone who asked--and a lot of people who didn't--that I was from a wealthy family in Bevelle. The upper-crust, high-society, tea-sipping, ballgown-wearing, practically-royalty kind of family. I was the proper young daughter who would have become a debutante and married someone from another one of the Bevellian "best families" if destiny hadn't called me to be a summoner. Oh, how my parents and younger siblings wept to see me leave, but they knew that I was only sacrificing myself to protect them from the evil ravaging of Sin! What a noble, pure young maiden I was!  
  
Hah. And if you believe that, I have some real estate in Zanarkand I'd like to sell you, you sucker.  
  
Forgive me; it seems I'm forgetting myself. I am the Lady Summoner Dona. I have told that story so many times that there are moments when even I can almost believe it's the truth.  
  
As much as it shames me to admit it, my noble parentage is...my, I can feel myself slipping again; I must apologize...but it's absolute crap. I'm not from Bevelle. My family wasn't rich. Yevon, I don't even know who my family was. My earliest memories are of an orphanage in a little village on the Djose Highroad that was later destroyed by Sin.  
  
That, incidentally, was where I met Barthello, my adoring if slightly dimwitted guardian. I must have been around thirteen at the time. I had made the mistake of insulting the intelligence of a group of ruffians, boys a little older than I, and they turned on me. The consequences might've been dire if Barthello, who was completely infatuated with me, hadn't stepped in to protect him. His worshipful attitude and awe at merely being allowed to be in my presence combined with his thickheaded willingness to undertake any quest for my sake and his excellent fighting skills made him a natural guardian. Of course, when I suggested it, he was absolutely thrilled at the prospect.  
  
Ah, Barthello. My darling numbscull. I'm a little loath to admit this as well, but we really do make a good team. I provide the brains of the operation, he the brawn. What will you do when I'm gone, Barthello? Will you find another scantily-clad princess-wannabe and take her as the object of your affections?  
  
He was the only one who cared when I announced, at age 15, that I was going to become a summoner. Perhaps I did it *because* no one else cared. I was a plain child, with dark, ruddy skin and dirty black hair that hung limply around my face. I had no parents. Looking back on it, my only true friend was Barthello. No one was interested in my pronouncement. I had sentenced myself to death to make them notice me, and it didn't work.  
  
But once I had started, there was no turning back. They did not notice my courage, but they would have noticed my cowardice.  
  
That, you see, is the beautiful irony of the life of a summoner. Summoners who defeat Sin are revered for obvious reasons, given the title of High Summoner and a statue in every temple from Besaid to Bevelle. Summoners who die along the way are also venerated and honored. Offerings are made to the temples in their names, all of Yevon prays for them, and a whole new wave of believers are inspired to become summoners. But let that summoner turn back, or fail to receive an aeon, or decide that she values her life...and she is forever shunned as a coward by the world. Spira loves summoners--but only when they are dead. Living summoners are worthless.  
  
But a pilgrimage is a long process. Some can take a year or more. For that year, I would be the most famous and respected woman in all of Spira. Every man would desire me, every woman desire to be me. My hair and clothing style would be imitated all over the land, even in places of high fashion like Luca and Bevelle. I'd get the best table at every restaurant and the best room in every hotel. For someone who had spent a lifetime in the shadows, passing unnoticed through the world, that year of glory would be worth dying for.  
  
But it was not to be.  
  
Why, you ask? I was a summoner. I was Spira's salvation. I was beautiful now, and I was careful always to wear outfits that showed off my body to best advantage. I had learned to speak and act in a cultured way. I was intelligent, gorgeous, and noble. By all rights, I should have become Spira's darling. But someone else, a little girl who started her pilgrimage mere weeks before mine, beat me to it.  
  
Her name was Yuna.  
  
She was a mere child at seventeen, fresh-eyed and open-hearted. She was not as jaded as I, not by a long shot. Her constant smile and laughter rang in the ears and the eyes and the hearts of everyone in Spira. With her mouse-brown hair, she wasn't even all that pretty. She was not particularly driven except by her own sheer will, and she traveled with a noisy horde of guardians that I wouldn't have been able to stand.  
  
The difference between her and all the other fresh-faced little tramps that die along the road to Zanarkand was that one of her guardians was Sir Auron. She, unlike me, really was from Bevelle. She was the daughter of High Summoner Braska, the champion of the last Calm.  
  
She didn't have to do anything. She would have been the favorite by the mere power of her bloodline! Whereas I, I who had worked so hard to become everything Spira needed, was cast by the wayside. Ignored. Rejected. Thrown on the trash heap.  
  
I have suffered for my destiny. I have been attacked, mauled by fiends, kidnapped and held prisoner by a band of heathen savages, and dragged all over Spira on a sacreligious flying ship. I have performed the sending more times than I care to remember. I have seen the way the people of Spira suffer, and I have vowed to end that suffering.  
  
But I have also been upstaged, again and again and again, and I will tolerate it no longer. I have fought my whole life to be seen, and seen I will be. I will defeat Sin and send it into oblivion once and for all. Braska's daughter will not have the glory that is to be mine.  
  
I have made my choice. I have accepted my path. I am going to summon the Final Aeon and die.  
  
But I am going to do it in the spotlight. 


	2. Alone

Disclaimer: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2 Spira, and all related characters and locations are owned by Squaresoft, with the exception of a few original characters who will be noted as such. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  
  
I looked over the Dona POV after playing FFX-2 and realized that it was incomplete. So here's the second part, relating to the second game and the two years in between the games. I don't own them. Don't sue me.  
  
_Alone_  
  
by flame mage

* * *

I failed.  
  
Unlike most summoners, I have a lifetime to live with that. The majority who fail to perform the Final Summoning and defeat Sin die during the pilgrimage. Their graves litter the heights of Mt. Gagazet; their unsent spirits--and most are never sent, because who is left to send the sender?--walk the routes of their pilgrimages and stalk any of their living guardians for eternity.  
  
They have it easy. They have to face their deaths but not their failures. They never have to hear the angry whispers as they walk through the streets, never have to be called "former summoner" and hear the pointedness in the words. One day I was "Lady Dona." The next day, I was just "Dona" once again.  
  
I can't even describe the way it felt.  
  
For a long time I was despondent. I pushed away anyone who tried to talk to me. I'd felt alone on my pilgrimage--not so much because I was above and suddenly different from all the people who had once shunned me, but more when they rejected me again and turned to that hateful child, Yuna--but at that moment I felt more so than I had since my childhood. All the years of training, my early pilgrimage...they had separated me from things like loneliness and shame.  
  
I actually wasn't alone, though. The former summoner Isaaru went through the same process, perhaps more painfully--his pilgrimage was halted directly by Sir Auron, Yuna's legendary inherited guardian. Of course. It would stand to reason that the child would try to stop her competitors in their tracks. For a time I toyed with the idea that she had paid the Al Bhed to kidnap me. Perhaps she did. She wouldn't have been the first summoner to tamper with the pilgrimages of anyone who might have stood in her way. Despite her fresh-faced innocence, she knew something of publicity stunts.  
  
I should be grateful to the brat for succeeding, I suppose, or my burden of failure would have been even harder to bear. The Calm happened. My failure didn't cost anyone anything except me.  
  
It broke Isaaru. Now he's a tour guide at Zanarkand, if you can imagine, leading gawking imbeciles around ruins he wasn't strong enough to see with his own eyes. Defiling a place I used to believe was sacred. There were days when I believed I would go mad. Isaaru did.  
  
It seems the world went mad too, sometime in those two years since this Calm began. The Eternal Calm. Ha. I preferred the days of Sin, when I had some societal value. Was the corruption of Yevon better than this age of...purposelessness?  
  
Oh, Yevon's corruption hasn't ended, of course. It's still around, under new management Instead of four maesters, it's led by a single praetor--easier for the entire order to be manipulated under a single thumb, with no troublesome do-gooders like Kelk Ronso present to protest. It's still poisoning the minds of those who are weak enough to need a religion to cling to, the frail-minded who still hold on to their false hope.  
  
The real hope in Spira comes from the Youth League, led by the former Crusader Mevyn Nooj. The League is dedicated to recovering the spheres of Spira's past, spheres long covered up by the machinations of Yevon. Here in Kilika, thanks be to Yevon--  
  
--old habits are hard to break.  
  
I meant to say that here in Kilika, the Youth League has quite a strong following. Sphere hunters are turning up records all over Spira, even as I speak, and shipping them to our headquarters at Mushroom Rock. And each one brings us closer to knowing the true story of Spira's past.  
  
I must admit that it's personal for me. For two years I have been consumed with...my, but it's strange to admit this to someone. I have been consumed with the desperate need to know why Yevon lied to us for so long. Why Yevon lied to me.  
  
In Spira, it is automatically assumed that all non-Al Bheds are Yevonites, but I first remember adopting Yevon in any conscious sense at the orphanage when I was a girl. For many of the other abandoned children there, perhaps it offered a bastion of hope to feel that an all-powerful deity was watching over them and would protect them. It offered me hope, too, but a different kind of hope--the hope of becoming a summoner. The hope of becoming someone.  
  
I was never a fanatic, but driven by that hope, I believed. I put whatever faith I had in Yevon, and started becoming a summoner at fifteen. As all those hours of prayer became days, days became weeks, weeks became months, months became years, I, too, began to hold onto the hope that I could atone for the sins of mankind, and perhaps my pilgrimage would be the last.  
  
When Yuna first came back with her motley crew of "guardians" and announced to the world Yunalesca's tale of the futility of the pilgrimage, that summoners could never free Spira from the shadow of Sin, I could not believe her. I was sure she was trying to justify her own cowardice. She had been afraid to die, and so she had tried to kill Sin another way, defying tradition. Sometimes even now I catch myself thinking that perhaps Sin isn't really gone.  
  
The Youth League and its spheres told me the truth.  
  
And now I have to know why. Why no one searched for solutions earlier. Why summoners were never told that their legacies were only temporary. Why only a coward could defeat Sin.  
  
If Yevon's lies hadn't forced me to become a summoner, I could have become a hero some other way. I wouldn't have had to feel so alone, these long two years.  
  
As I said before, of course, I was never really alone. Perhaps Isaaru suffered similar things before his breakdown, so emotionally someone else may have been near me. And physically--there was always Barthello.  
  
Until now.  
  
When I knew my pilgrimage was over, Barthello was the only one who was there with me. Barthello, my lone guardian. My lover. The closest thing to a friend I've ever had. He was always a numbskull, and I'd never given him much credit for being able to understand me, but he knew that we'd reached the end of our journey without me ever having to say it. He never said a word, either, only held me. Only let me scream and rant and sob. Only stood silent and composed under the rain of blows and insults I hurled at him that night. He never told anyone that I'd lost my own composure. Ever since I met him, I'd taken him for granted every day, but I realized later because of that night that he was a real person. It didn't stop me from taking him for granted, but it forced me to realize that he'd become more than a convenience in the years we'd been together.  
  
I thought he'd leave. He didn't. He stayed. When Kilika was rebuilt, he came back with me. He was the one who bought our house, with the money he told me he'd been saving to build a statue of me when I had summoned my Final Aeon.  
  
He swore that he'd keep on protecting me, as he always had, for the rest of our lives.  
  
I could never tell him this, but I was grateful for that.  
  
But he still clung to Yevon. When New Yevon regrouped, he was one of the first to rejoin the church, attend services, praise Yevon. Suddenly I began to come home and not find him waiting for me, as he always had been. He was at the temple instead, praying. As long as I'd known him, I'd been at the temples myself--praying as part of my training, or praying for a new Aeon. Now I had left the temples in the past, and he was still stuck there.  
  
Finally, a few weeks ago, I threw him out.  
  
I couldn't stand it any longer. After all, he was the one protecting me. A guardian should respect the wishes of his summone--my, my, my, even after all this time I still can't get the old jargon out of my head.  
  
Strange how many little things are different. Strange how many little things remind me of him.  
  
He was wrong. Of course. It goes without saying that I was in the right. But perhaps...perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps there are things that are more important than this argument. Perhaps it's more important that we're together.  
  
What am I saying?  
  
He was wrong.  
  
But he's a person.  
  
But he was wrong.  
  
But I love him. Even though he was wrong.  
  
I wish he'd just admit it and come home.  
  
Because alone here--in our house in a new Spira--I am realizing that admitting that he's human may be the first step to finding out who _I_ am as a human. Being more than a nameless orphan. Being more than a summoner. Being more than a slave to the spotlight.I wonder now if I've ever really known who "Dona" is.  
  
But he was wrong. Yuna was wrong. Yevon was wrong. Everyone is wrong but me.  
  
Outside our house, the people and the trees and the canals of Kilika are all moving. Inside, everything is still. Inside, I'm all alone. 


End file.
